Dr. Kipper Reveals His Solution to Treating Addiction; Imus Displays Another Possible Addiction?

Dr. David Kipper, a Los Angeles-based internist who has treated addictive disorders for more than 20 years, told Imus, a recovering drug and alcohol addict, that he is an anomaly.
 
“Ninety percent of people relapse,” said Kipper, whose new book is The Addiction Solution. “The statistics stink, frankly.”
 
Though rehab is “great,” in his view, because it isolates people for 30 days in a structured, sober environment, eventually they are released back to their lives. “The problem is we don’t treat the underlying problem, which is our brain chemistry,” Kipper said. “That’s the missing link.”
 
Science has shown that the disease of addiction originates from an imbalance of neurotransmitters—like serotonin, dopamine, and noradrenaline—in the brain. “Until we can rebalance these transmitters, we’re never going to have a chance at succeeding in these behavioral therapies,” Kipper said, referring to rehab.
 
His solution is to correct this imbalance by treating it chemically with very targeted, non-addictive, FDA-approved pharmaceuticals. “People don’t need these forever,” Kipper said. “They just need them initially to get rebalanced.” Once that has been achieved, the addict continues on to rehab, where her or she is now better prepared to receive traditional therapies.
 
Imus, who went to rehab 24 years ago and has never relapsed, said one of the more frustrating things about being an addict is that most people think quitting an addiction is merely a question of willpower.
 
“This disease has always been looked at as a behavioral malady, and so there’s judgment, there’s guilt,” Kipper said. “It’s very hard to get people to be sympathetic to your plight.”
 
Now, he believes, there is hope that addiction will be treated as the chronic, medical disease that it actually is, much like diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. The only obstacle standing in the way of more effective treatment is that only ten percent of medical schools teach addiction, and one-half of one percent of physicians is trained in addiction.
 
“This is a big problem in our health care system,” Kipper said. “Pretty soon we’re going to have 32 million more people in the health care lines, and less doctors to treat people. This disease is not going away.”
 
Alcoholics Anonymous does not foster medical management of addiction, but Kipper believes its founder Bill Wilson would have supported his approach. “He was always looking for that missing link that was beyond the behavioral therapy,” Kipper said. “He was pushing niacin, and B-vitamins, and he was taking hallucinogenics. He was looking for that medical link that would have actually been the missing component.”
 
Addiction, he insisted, is about brain chemistry as much as it is about the substance that is abused. Kipper’s method of treating it with medications is much less controversial today than it was ten years ago, but its incorporation into the medical community has still been slow.
 
When a patient first approaches him with an addiction problem, Kipper’s goal is to identify that person’s neuro-chemical deficit. It has little to do with their Vitamin D levels, he told Imus, who admittedly asked that question for selfish reasons.
 
“I’m not afraid of living or dying, but I am afraid I’m going to have to go five minutes without talking about me,” he said, displaying the possibility that, over the last 24 years, a different, equally chronic kind of addiction has developed.
 
-Julie Kanfer